sourcedestdir says to keep the generated source .java files and to put them in the specified directory. I prefer a separate source directory to distinguish it from edited code.

target is the JAX-WS version. (It seems to default to 2.2, even with my WAS 8.5.5 Java 6 SDK.)

wsdl points to the local file to generate the proxy from

wsdllocation allows the generated code to access the necessary WSDL from a location other than where the source WSDL file was located. See Bare JAX-WS, below, for some details. I admit I've yet to work out my preferred solution here. I want to reference it from a location like /WEB-INF/wsdl/service.wsdl, but that might still require changes to the generated source to accomplish.

xnocompile means to not compile the source code immediately. Since either RAD or a later Ant step will do this, it's unnecessary. No compiling also means the destdir isn't actually used.

xendorsed="true" , not shown here, is necessary if you want to generate JAX-WS 2.2 code from Java 6

References and Articles

Edit: Update for newer WebSphere fixpacks

A colleague discovered that with the latest copies of the two "plugins" jars, the wsimport task no longer works. Sure enough, com.sun.tools.ws.ant.WsImport is no longer in com.ibm.jaxws.tools.jar. The Knowledge Center article Generating Java artifacts for JAX-WS applications from a WSDL file still claims that is the correct class for the Ant task, but we were unable to find it in any of the jars that seem to be included by the ws_ant script that the article says must be used.

Instead, however, the class com.ibm.jtc.jax.tools.ws.ant.WsImport is in com.ibm.jaxws.tools.jar, and it appears to work as a drop-in replacement: